Read Ebook: The education of Uncle Paul by Blackwood Algernon

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Ebook has 1339 lines and 77526 words, and 27 pages

'I'm so glad.' And then another pause. In which fashion they talked on for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other--wondering a little why they did not feel all kind of poignant emotions they had rather expected to feel.

It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister who had grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who were utterly different types, and who yet wished to hold to one another as the nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed pleasantly and, so far as he was concerned, more and more easily, over the surface of things. Her talk, like her letters, was sincere, simple, shallow; it concealed no hidden depths, he felt at once. And by degrees, even in this first conversation, crept a shadow of other things, so that he realised they were in reality leagues apart, and could never have anything much in common below the pleasant surface relations of life.

Yet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very nature to mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in another way. She was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and she was Dick's widow. They would get along together all right; they would be good friends.

'Twenty years, Margaret.'

'Twenty years, Paul.'

And then another pause of several minutes during which something that was too vague to be a real thought passed like a shadow through his mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in her that was necessary to his life and happiness--Dick Messenger, who was scholar, poet, thinker--who sought the everlasting things--God? He instantly suppressed it as unworthy, something of which he was ashamed, but not before it had left a definite little trace in his imagination.

'So at last, Paul, you've really come home,' she resumed; 'I can hardly believe it,--and are going to settle down. You are a rich man.'

'Aunt Alice did her duty,' he laughed. He ignored the reference to settling down. It vaguely displeased him. 'It's for you as well as me,' he added, meaning the money. 'I want to share with you whatever you need.'

'Not a penny,' she said quickly; 'I have all I need. I live with my memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,--after all your hard life out there.'

'The life wasn't hard; it was rather wonderful,' he said simply. 'I liked it.'

'For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences and lived with very rough people in those--lumber camp places you wrote about.'

He shrugged his shoulders. 'Simple kind of men, but very decent, very genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then you know I never cared for frills, Margaret.'

'Frills!' she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. 'Of course not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must often have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you. You can't have had any of the society that one's accustomed to.'

'Not of that kind,' he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, 'but of other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.'

She turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he divined, had been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first time in his life he realised that they were large and rough and brown. Her own were so pale and dainty--like china hands, glossy and smooth--and the gold bangle on her thin wrist looked as though every second it must slip over her fingers. His own hands disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.

She turned to him with a gentle smile. 'Anyhow,' she said, 'it is simply too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It must seem strange to you at first, and there are so many things to talk over--such a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You'll get used to us after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the neighbourhood who are dying to meet you.'

Her brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to interfere with their 'dying'; but, instead, he returned her smile. 'I'm a poor hand at meeting people, I'm afraid,' he said. 'I'm not as sociable as I might be.'

'But you'll get over that. Of course, living so long in the backwoods makes one unsociable. But we'll try and make you happy and comfortable. You have no idea how very, very glad I am that you've come home.'

Paul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she smiled frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy sort of personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away altogether, or disappear like a soap-bubble.

'I'm glad too, of course,' he replied. 'Only at my age, you know, it's not easy to tackle new habits.'

'No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,' she said with truth; 'so that shall be our own little private secret. You look quite absurdly young.'

They laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at home and soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been in the least formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he knew a little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from being made a fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval before tea, they left their chairs and strolled through the garden, and as they went, the talk turned upon the past, and his sister spoke of Dick and of all he had meant to do in the world, had he lived. Paul heard the details of his sudden death for the first time. Her voice and manner were evidence of the melancholy she still felt, but her brother's heart was deeply stirred; he asked for all the particulars he had so often wondered about, and in her quiet, soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness, she supplied the information. Clearly she had never arisen from the blow. She had worshipped Dick without understanding him.

'Death always frightens me, I think,' she said with a faint smile. 'I try not to think about it.'

She passed on to speak of the children, and told him how difficult she found it to cope with them--she suffered from frequent headaches and could not endure noise--and how she hoped when they were a little older to be more with them. Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an excellent woman and was teaching them all they should know.

'Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am able,' she explained, 'and only wish I were stronger.'

They sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat gravel paths that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the rhododendron bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was very peaceful, very beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The hush of centuries of cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies flew gently, as to the measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated undue animation. Paul caught his thoughts wandering to the open spaces of untamed moorland he had seen from the hill-top. More and more, as his sister's personality revealed itself, he got the impression that she lived enclosed like the wooden cows he had seen from the train, in a little green field, with precise and neatly trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other symptoms of plain and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and sweet--only it was such a conventional way, he felt.

Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall, filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.

'This is the Gwyle,' she said, as they entered the shade, 'it was Dick's favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it's dark even in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always think.'

Paul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was strong with open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far overhead the tufted pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the ground ran away downhill, becoming broken up and uneven; nothing but dark, slender stems rose everywhere about him, like giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the pools of a deep sea. And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the shadows and the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed suddenly--willy-nilly, as his nature would have it--into that mood when the simplest things about him turned their faces upwards so that he caught their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something in this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful, entered his soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty of the great spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its informing spirit? How and where could it link on so intimately with his soul? And could it not be a channel, as he always felt it must be, to the God behind it? Beauty seized him by the throat and made him tremble.

This sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever like the sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key. Something, too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was accustomed to space in bulk--the space the stars and winds live in--had come to this little, parcelled-out place. He felt clipped already. He turned to the shadowy personality beside him, the boyish impulse bursting its way out. After all, she was his own sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to her.

'It's the Gwyle wood,' she said quietly. 'It's usually rather damp. But Dick loved it.'

Her brother hardly heard what she said. 'Listen,' he said in a hushed tone; 'do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The wood is full of whispers. There's no sound in the world like that murmur of a soft breeze in pine branches. It's like the old gods sighing, which only their true worshippers hear! Isn't it fine and melancholy? Margaret, d'you know, it goes through me like a fever.'

His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.

'It's the Gwyle wood,' she repeated mechanically. 'It's very pretty, I think. Dick always thought so too.'

Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell into silence.

'Nature excites me sometimes,' he said presently. 'I suppose it's because I've known nothing else.'

'That's quite natural, I'm sure, Paul dear,' she rejoined, turning to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; 'it's very pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.'

'Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need of my being certainly.' He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter absence of comprehension.

'In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I had no idea you were clever like that.' She was perfectly sincere in what she said.

Her brother blushed like a boy. 'It's my foolishness, I suppose, Margaret,' he said with a shy laugh. 'I am certainly not clever.'

'Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart's content. You must use the place as though it were your own exactly.'

'Thank you, Margaret.'

'Only I don't think I quite understand all those things,' she added vaguely after a pause. 'Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor Dick's ideas and strange fancies. I really can't keep up with her at all.'

Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good intentions.

'She comes down to this wood far too much, and I'm sure it's not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.' Then she turned to him and smiled. 'But they are all so excited about your coming. They will simply devour you.'

'I'm a poor hand at children, I'm afraid,' he said, falling back upon his usual formula, 'but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.'

She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet he could love her, and he meant to.

They crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.

Their eyes met. They had seen him.

There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him through the glass. 'So that's Uncle Paul!' was the thought in the mind of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted though it was from a distance.

But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out of sight.

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